<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>pale green things by salvabon</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26954974">pale green things</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvabon/pseuds/salvabon'>salvabon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The X-Files</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bill and Teena Mulder are bad parents, Episode: s02e16 Colony, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Misgendering, Samantha is the real deal because I am not a monster, Scully is there because I say so, Trans Fox Mulder, Transphobia, kind of pre-relationship, there is no alien clone plot because I Do Not Care For It, this fic was revealed to me in a dream</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 18:48:13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,031</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26954974</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvabon/pseuds/salvabon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mulder receives a phone call from his father that there is a family emergency he does not know what to expect, especially since they haven't spoken since his coming out. He definitely doesn't expect Samantha to be standing in front of him suddenly.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Fox Mulder &amp; Dana Scully, Fox Mulder &amp; Samantha Mulder, Fox Mulder/Dana Scully</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Trans Mulder Literary Universe</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>pale green things</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlannelGuy51/gifts">FlannelGuy51</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The title is once again a reference to the Mountain Goats because I am apparently unable to write a Trans Mulder fic without projecting it onto a heartbreaking song. </p><p>This is essentially just Colony but Trans and without any of the actual Colony stuff. Fuck canon, I just want Samantha back. </p><p>@ Matt I took you up on the offer and put in that one dialogue snippet, I hope you like what I've done with it!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"Where are you going?" "Home."<br/>
Mulder is already half through the door, jacket in hand, his brain painfully focused on the phone call he just had, the cold voice of his father. Hearing his mother pronounce his old name left a bitter taste in his mouth he never can shake. It echoes in his head still, telling him that he will never escape it, no matter how hard he tries.<br/>
"Do you want me to come with you?"<br/>
Mulder stops to consider, turning around halfway deep in thought but he nods. There are no words right now, not for what he is feeling or for why he needs Scully to be there with him. They had just been in an argument minutes ago, Scully calling him insane and him lashing out at her. And still he wants her to be by his side at all costs. He wants to apologise for earlier, but no words come out. But when he turns to look at her he can see in her eyes understanding and acceptance. He often thinks that he doesn't deserve her but just as often he simply wishes he did.<br/>
They walk to his car in silence, Scully a step or two behind him. She steadies him without a single touch. Mulder can feel his heart beating out of his chest. Crashing into a windshield and falling onto the asphalt hadn't been the most pleasant experience and it was just worsened by the fact that his chest still felt a little tender after his surgery. Scully had assured him that it was healing up fine, but his nerves were still a little sensitive and would stay that way for a while. And now this call from his parents. He hadn't spoken with his mother since the surgery, when some misguided nurse had called his family contacts against his wishes to inform them about him being fine. His father hadn't called back, he never did. This call had been the most amount of words they had exchanged in this decade probably. His mother had lectured him for what felt like an eternity about how she didn't want to see him destroying his body like that. He had simply listened, just half awake while the anaesthetics were wearing off and the cotton-soft numbness was being replaced with soreness and pain. Scully had taken care of him then too, only seeing his facial expression as he held the phone, putting one and one together from all the little hints she had received from him about his family. She never met them, he never talked about them unless he had to.<br/>
"Mulder is everything okay?" she breaks through the storm raging in his brain - and the silence in the car.<br/>
"Yeah, I just haven't been home in a while."<br/>
Mulder is driving by muscle memory alone. Does he really want to put Scully through this too? The answer, he knows, is no, but he isn’t sure if he would make it through any news awaiting him at the end of the road without her. He tells himself, over and over again, how Scully was the one person he trusted. Scully had accepted him when he came out (even though it had taken the danger of being forcefully outed by Phoebe for him to go through with it). She had not just said it to him but shown it to him every single day they were working together. She had stuck with Spooky Mulder, even though associating with him was basically career suicide at this point. She had surprised him by reading up on every single journal article on HRT basically overnight. And she had turned up by his side when he woke up after top surgery even though he hadn’t told her about it. And now she would meet his parents and still the fear remained that suddenly she would change her mind, that seeing his parents disappointed looks and the pain he put them through would make her see something ugly about him, something selfish. Spooky Mulder who only thought about his own little mission, destroying her career, and breaking his parents’ heart. Spooky Mulder who’s fault it was that she was abducted, who couldn’t even save his own sister, let alone find her. He shouldn’t have asked her to come, she shouldn’t have to be his safety net after everything he put her through already that he could never make up to her and maybe he should just face this alone and suffer and -<br/>
And suddenly they are at the airport, car parked, and he feels himself cutting the engine and getting out of the car, but he isn’t really there. He feels mechanic. He can see her looking at him worried, but he still can’t say anything. He wants to assure her that he is fine, wants to tell her that he can do this alone and that she can go home again. He should tell her this. And he keeps walking, Scully by his side, both walking to the flight desk with nothing but their little emergency hand luggage, looking for the next flight up north. The person behind the desk does not seem to mind his mumbled monotone and checks them in, tells them they just arrived in time to catch the last flight if they hurry.<br/>
“Mulder, you don’t have to say anything but please know I am here for you,” Scully says after they boarded their seats, last row middle and window. She strokes his hand on the arm rest they share between them. He looks away from the tarmac outside and into her eyes. They are kind. They are understanding.<br/>
“I just don’t know what is awaiting me,” he confesses. A weight falls from his shoulders but returns when he remembers that he didn’t want to bother her with all this.<br/>
“Didn’t they tell you why you should come home?”<br/>
He shakes his head: “No, that would involve them actually talking to me.”<br/>
Scully grabs his hand a bit stronger.<br/>
“I know you don’t really talk about them, but…” She trails off, unsure how to phrase it.<br/>
“What am I supposed to say, Scully? That I haven’t talked to my father since my coming out? That my mum only calls me to tell me that she lost two daughters? That I am trans and my parents hate me for it?”<br/>
The look on Scully’s face is enough to break his heart two times over.<br/>
“I am sorry,” she says with that gentle voice of hers. He is sure that she is going to say that this isn’t true, that his family just wants the best for him, that they can’t possibly hate him.<br/>
“But you know that you have a family that loves you, right? Me, Skinner, the Lone Gunmen?”<br/>
Mulder doesn’t know what to say, dumbstruck once again, too many times today to count. So he just hugs her, as tightly as these airplane seats allow as the machine takes off.<br/>
“Whatever your parents called you home for, we will get through this, okay? And I am there with you, and the rest of your family is waiting home in DC.”<br/>
“I don’t deserve you,” he says in a teasing tone but with conviction.<br/>
“Let me be the judge of that,” she quips and leans back into her seat. The East Coast slowly vanishes under clouds. Her hand is still on his. Mulder has arrived back in his body and for a minute or two his brain has shut up replaying his parents voices in his head. He looks outside the window, white clouds and pale green things, fields maybe, below them. It is only when the airplane touches down severely that Mulder comes to again and feels Scully jerking back her hand as she unbuckles and steps into the aisle.<br/>
It is now that the anxiety returns, just as he thought he had shaken it away. They shuffle along the aisle slowly as people disembark. Mulder places one foot in front of the other carefully, as if shaky from the landing, but really, he is just lost in thought again as Scully leads the way. Was his mother sick? Was his father sick? Probably one of them was, probably they called him to tell him. Maybe they would blame him, blame the strain his “decision” had put on them. “Decision,” his mother called it, as if he had any other choice. As if those first 18 or so years hadn’t almost killed him. And maybe he would finally tell them this, maybe he would finally be able to explain it to them. Because Scully was by his side.<br/>
They walk past the baggage claim, through customs, and to the car rental, Scully doing the talking this time. It isn’t far from here and they drive their old rental car all the way over the Vineyard, past more of the pale green landscape he knows so well. They arrive somewhere between late evening and early morning, unsure if anyone will even still be awake by now.<br/>
Scully follows a step behind him again as he walks towards their house, practically jogging. The house is still illuminated but the night presses down so completely around them that neither of them sees Mulder’s father until he lights a cigarette on the porch.<br/>
“Your mother needs some time,” Bill Mulder says. Mulder turns to him, once again feeling like the young adult who was told the same thing after his coming out, when his mother had cried the whole day in her room.<br/>
“You said it was an emergency.”<br/>
Did they really just call him here again to berate him? Did his father and mother reunite for a day just for that? </p><p>Scully, hearing the anger in his voice rise up touches his back lightly. It works like an earthwire.<br/>
Bill gets up from the porch, both men walking towards each other, Mulder’s hug being cut short by an outstretched hand. He takes it tentatively, trying to match his handshake. “I am your son, not some stranger,” he wants to shout at him, but he is cut short by the next words coming out of his fathers mouth: “She wanted you to come.”<br/>
His emphasis on the first word is all he needs to know that there are a million other places his father would rather be right now, that he wouldn’t even had answered the phone if his mother hadn’t given it to him. Fox Mulder was the black sheep of the family still, and his father would rather grieve two daughters than acknowledge the son standing in front of him. The son ready to forgive years of silence and mistreatment for a hug, a mention of his name, anything that made him less of a stranger.<br/>
“It’s a difficult time,” he goes on. “I appreciate you coming at such short notice.”<br/>
Scully, still standing in the background until now quickly shakes Bill Mulder’s hand with an icy stare: “Dana Scully, I am Fox’ partner.”<br/>
His father grimaces as Scully mentions his name but nods wordlessly. “William Mulder, call me Bill.” With that Scully vanishes into the background again, keeping an eye on the two instead.<br/>
“What is it, dad?”<br/>
“The certainty,” he begins slowly, “becomes a comfort that allows you to move on. We bury our memories so deep after all that has been destroyed... never expecting…”<br/>
Mulder has a hard time grasping what he means. He looks inside, seeing his mother crying. He is used to that, she has been doing that a lot, after the divorce, after his coming out, just recently when calling him in hospital. But there is someone else sitting beside her, someone he can’t really make out. And it only now clicks that maybe this time this isn’t actually about him.<br/>
“Who is mum talking to?”<br/>
It can’t be. He isn’t even allowing himself to think it. Not after all this time. Certainty, his father had said. Certainty was always Mulder’s biggest hope and fear. He needed the truth to move on, any truth, any certainty. But certainty meant confronting this truth, confronting the guilt he still felt after all these years. If it was – his brain still didn’t allow him to finish this thought – then the question was no longer the search for the truth, but how to cope with that all of this was real, all these years he had spent searching really passed for him – and for her as well. And that whatever worst nightmare he could picture could have happened to her might actually be confirmed.<br/>
“Your sister.”<br/>
The air smells of cigarette smoke. His heart is beating. He is breathing. Slowly he turns to the window fully, inching closer to look at the woman sitting in front of his crying mother.<br/>
There were feelings, thoughts, incomprehensible waves of information flooding his brain. He hears a step, feels a familiar hand on his shoulder. Scully’s perfume. It is dark outside. Inside the lights are on. His mother is crying. There is a woman, her back turned.<br/>
He steps inside, around the corner and into the living room with long strides. The woman stands up, her face strange yet so familiar. She has the same eyes and the way her mouth stands slightly open with the same curiosity as back then leaves no question open. It is her.<br/>
And suddenly he becomes all too aware of how much he has changed, not just in age but in appearance. He is a grown man now, emphasis on both words. Last time they saw each other they were kids, her barely old enough to understand when he told her that he wishes he was her brother. He had short hair then (he had cut it himself against the wishes of his parents), but it had taken him years and hard work to grow into his looks today. His parents had made all too clear that his transition had made him a stranger to them. How could he expect her to recognise him, to see in him anything but a strange man who had just burst through the door?<br/>
“Fox.”<br/>
It is a statement, not a question. He can see the hint of a smile as she says it, standing there before him in flesh and blood. She says it with certainty, not a slighter of doubt in her voice. She says it without judgement. She remembers him, she remembers her silly little nickname for him, the nickname that would become his legal name many years later.<br/>
Only now his surroundings get into focus again, and with them his mother, an uneasy smile on her lips.<br/>
“This was surely an exciting evening for everyone, but I think your sister should go to bed now. You have all the time in the world to catch up about certain things in the morning.”<br/>
With these words she is already wrapping an arm around her, leading her into one of the bedrooms. Mulder is left to stand there, alone, until he hears the door open and heels click into his direction.<br/>
“Mulder, are you okay?”<br/>
“It’s really her,” he says before he cannot help himself but hug Scully with all his might.<br/>
“I’m so happy for you,” she answers as he presses her into his shoulder.<br/>
He can hear Bill coming in only seconds later.<br/>
“You can have the guest room.” Those are his last words for the evening before vanishing into some other part of the house.<br/>
Mulder isn’t much more talkative right now, still processing what had just happened. He navigates the home with ease, giving Scully a duvet to sleep with.<br/>
“Don’t stay up too late,” she warns him playfully, a little bit of worry swinging with it in her voice.<br/>
“I’m fine,” he tells her. “Don’t worry.”<br/>
And he is, weirdly enough. Not completely, he isn’t even sure if he is capable of that. But there is a weight being lifted from his chest piece by piece, and it is still not finished being lifted, but it is getting there. Tomorrow will be another day, the first with his sister in a long time.<br/>
His mother is sitting in bed, restless, and he understands it. For a second, he forgets about everything she said and did and leans over her, fluffing up her pillow, covering her in a blanket. With bitterness he realises that he is doing what he wishes she did when he was in hospital.<br/>
“You’re exhausted. We all are.”<br/>
He kisses her on the forehead. They had all lost her, all in different ways.<br/>
He turns around to leave, expecting nothing from her. Expecting even less now that she had one of her daughters back. And he seemed to be the only one who understood the other one would truly never return, because that version of himself no longer existed, never had existed in the first place, if she accepted it or not.<br/>
“Fox?” It was a question asked tentatively, a word carefully tested in her mouth. It wasn’t the first time she had called him that, there was a time when Samantha had first come up with it that his parents had used it for him, playfully accepting it. But when Samantha was abducted it ceased from their vocabulary. When Mulder asked his parents to stop using his birthname, before he could properly explain why it bothered him so much, they had simply laughed it away as teenage rebellion. When he came out, when he had settled on his name, Fox Mulder, they had been less kind. Adding his fathers name to the middle had not helped either.<br/>
Hearing her say it for the first time like this, as a real name, as his name, cancels out how unconvinced she sounds.<br/>
“Yeah, mom?” He can hear his voice break at this.<br/>
“It is really her, isn’t it?”<br/>
“I don’t see who else it could be.”<br/>
He wants to say “Yes”. He wants to say, “she remembers my name”. But this is enough, for now, as the sky is slowly turning lighter in the preparation of sunrise.<br/>
He feels like a hypocrite telling his mother to sleep but not doing the same, but he is young and used to working for two or three days straight, so he slowly walks onto the porch again, now illuminated by the early morning. There are birds singing. The air smells like home. He looks up and takes a deep breath, taking it all in. Anxiety swells up in him again, about what is waiting for him when the family awakes. Samantha had called him by name, had recognised him, or had his mind just been playing tricks? Will she wake up in the morning and ask why this stranger is standing in their home? Will she ask after her sister? Will he have to explain it to her, or have his parents done it already in their crooked way?<br/>
When he slowly turns the corner to where he had met with his father earlier during the night, she is sitting there wrapped in a blanket with a serene expression on her face. She turns, having heard his slow and heavy steps. He smiles carefully, non-threateningly, and is met with a wide beam of a smile as a return. The same smile he grew up with. The same sister.<br/>
“Is it too late for a game of stratego?”<br/>
And there it was again, not just recognition but the unquestioning acceptance he had craved from his family all those years, that only Samantha had ever given him. The mention of the game they played was worth more than any correct name, any correct pronoun. She might as well have said “nothing has changed between us.”<br/>
He walks closer, less careful now, just wanting to bridge that gap between them.<br/>
“It’s twenty-two years too late.”<br/>
She gets up, blanket still over her shoulders, and bridges those last few steps.<br/>
“So much has happened, where do you begin?” Mulder waits for the unspoken question, for any kind of curve ball the universe could be throwing him right now.<br/>
“You look…”<br/>
“Different?”<br/>
“Like you’re you,” she finishes and reaches out to stroke the side of his face gently, down his cheek and tracing his jawline, including the light stubble growing back since his last shave. She smiles sweetly before attacking him with a hug, laughing and crying at the same time.<br/>
“I missed you so much,” He says. He is crying now too, finally letting these emotions overcome him, allowing himself what he wanted to do since his parents’ phone call. Fox Mulder knew he was more easily moved to tears than he maybe liked, but for once they were happy tears.<br/>
“I missed you too,” she says, repeatedly stroking the back of his head. “Even before I could remember.”<br/>
He takes a step back to wipe the tears from his eyes with his sleeve, keeping one hand on his sisters’ shoulder as if fearing he would lose her again.<br/>
“When I arrived here, well, at first mum cried a lot,” she explains. “And dad couldn’t think of anything to say, he just sat there,” she laughs and sniffles at the same time. Mulder wipes her tears away as well, both standing there a little shaky and overwhelmed.<br/>
“And I asked them where my brother was and dad simply left the room and mum asked if I meant my sister, and I got really confused and told her that I only remember having a brother. They told me to forget about it for the time and while we waited, and while we talked, more memories started returning and it dawned on me, you know.”<br/>
Both of them take a step back, Samantha turning around to lean on the porch railing. Mulder’s eyes are following her as she gestures in the same way she did as a child when explaining things, he face doing the same micro-expressions.<br/>
“You probably have a lot of questions.”<br/>
She shakes her head.<br/>
“Not for now. It’s just,” she stops to consider her words, turning into his direction as she continues:” Are you happy?”<br/>
He nods: “Yeah.”<br/>
“That’s all I need to know. You know, my memory is still a little spotty, but I remember you, us, and I remember our games and our nicknames and I remember annoying the hell out of you,” she bumps her hand into his arm playfully. “But I remember how… unhappy you were at times, Fox. And mum and dad, they…” She does not finish the sentence; she doesn’t have to.<br/>
“They didn’t take it too well, yeah.”<br/>
“You can tell me about it sometime later, okay?”<br/>
Mulder does not answer and instead wraps an arm around her, exhaling contently as he allows himself to relax, maybe for the first time in two decades.<br/>
“When you say your memory is spotty,” he hesitates. “I am sorry, you don’t have to talk about it now.”<br/>
He falls silent and looks into the direction of the house when he feels the weight of his sister’s head resting on his shoulder.<br/>
“I don’t mind, I have been waiting most of my life to be able to talk with you again. Do you want a cup of coffee?”<br/>
They settle into the kitchen with a full jug of coffee between them, facing each other in the dim warm light entering the kitchen from outside.<br/>
“To be honest, we are all still piecing together a lot of it, Fox. I was found when I was maybe ten years old, without any memory except for my first name, all the way in Colorado. I don’t know why they never connected my case back to here, maybe because of the distance, maybe the police were sloppy, but I was placed into a family. I still don’t remember the abduction or how I ended up in Colorado, and I was so young and so scared, all the memories are a little blurry still. I was… hurt, Fox. I don’t know by whom or how or why, and I don’t know if I want to know, but they hurt me.”<br/>
She takes a sip from her coffee to collect her thoughts, swallowing the tears down again. He grabs her hands as soon as she puts the mug down, stroking them slowly with his thumbs.<br/>
“It’s okay,” he says, swallowing down tears himself. “You don’t have to-““I know, but I want to. Anyway, somehow my brain hid all these memories from me to save me, at least that’s how my therapist explains it. And the trauma made me slowly forget that I had a biological family out there somewhere. And you must understand that my adoptive parents, they are still also my parents. They took good care of me, and I love them. But as I was growing up, I noticed more and more that there was something buried deep inside of me, thoughts and questions and memories and some unexplained longing. I started going to therapy after my parents explained to me that I have been repressing unresolved trauma. Over the last couple of years we have been puzzling together everything they and I can remember to try and find out what happened and find you. And then a couple of days ago we had a breakthrough, I suddenly remembered our old address and since then the memories just keep flowing back and…,”<br/>
“Now you’re here?”<br/>
“Now I’m here. And I learned that my big brother never gave up looking for me.”<br/>
“I knew you were out there somewhere, Samantha, I knew I would find the truth.”<br/>
A rustling noise, followed by a creaking door, makes both of them perk up from their conversation. Scully, dressed in pyjamas, approaches the kitchen with a tired smile.<br/>
“I knew I heard talking.”<br/>
“We couldn’t sleep,” Mulder explains as Scully just raises a knowing eyebrow at them.<br/>
“Nice to meet you, I’m Dana Scully, I’m Fox’ partner at the FBI.”<br/>
Samantha jumps up to shake her hand, pulling her into a hug right after.<br/>
“I’m Samantha, it’s so nice to meet you. So my brother works at the FBI?”<br/>
Mulder motions them to sit down while supplying Scully with a cup.<br/>
“Yes, he made quite a name for himself there.”<br/>
“Well that explains the outfit I would think, and I was scared for a second he works for the IRS.”<br/>
This got a chuckle from all of them.<br/>
“It is so nice to finally meet you after hearing so much about you.”<br/>
“I wish I could say the same. But I am sure I will catch up in no time.”<br/>
“Shouldn’t you all be in bed,” a gruff voice behind them not so much asks but states.<br/>
“I believe my brother and I are a little too old for bedtimes, don’t you think, dad?”<br/>
Bill just huffs and waves it away.<br/>
“Just be careful you don’t wake your mother.”<br/>
Mulder watches anxiously as Bill gets one more mug from the cupboard and empties the last of the coffee into it.<br/>
“I am surprised you even indulge in that weird illusion of your sister,” he mumbles and gestures vaguely into Mulder’s direction, only barely audible, but loud enough for Fox to stare in panic and Scully to turn towards Bill in anger. But before she can say anything Samantha already started talking: “He is my brother, dad. Always has been, always will be. I fought for years to find you all and seeing your closemindedness honest to god shocks me. Is it so difficult to accept something that I already understood as an eight-year-old?”<br/>
Fox cannot take his eyes of her, the same creased eyebrows and fiery look as ever. He had spent the last couple of hours processing that she truly was back and now she was sitting here at the same table as him and Scully, head held high, voice raised.<br/>
Bill Mulder gulps, neither arguing against it or making any admission to defeat and agreement.<br/>
Panicked, Samantha suddenly turns to Mulder.<br/>
“Oh god,” she whispers and looks at Scully. “Was I allowed to say that? I mean, does she know?”<br/>
Mulder smiles, seeing Scully crack a smile as she overhears his sister’s realisation of what she just may or may not have done.<br/>
“Don’t worry, she knows.”<br/>
“And I was just about to say the same thing,” she smiles, eying their father with the same icy glare as hours before.<br/>
“That is a relief. Fox, I am so glad you have such a nice partner. I hope you look out for each other. My mums, I mean my other mums, will be very excited to meet you two. And after breakfast you’ll have to tell me everything about your lives and how you ended up in the FBI. And-”<br/>
“Did someone say breakfast?” Another familiar voice joins in as Teena Mulder enters the kitchen as the last family member.<br/>
“I also couldn’t sleep, believe it or not.”<br/>
Mulder beams at her and loosens his tie, unsure of what else to do, but knowing that at least half of the people in this kitchen were on his side. Scully is taking turns looking at both of them with a satisfied smile, being the only person in this room knowing how god awful he looked just a couple of hours ago.<br/>
“I was just telling my brother Fox that he needs to fill me in on his life later on, mum.”<br/>
Samantha winks at him, a wink that can only be shared between siblings in the middle of a scheme their parents are still unaware of.<br/>
“That’s nice, honey, but would you please tell … Fox,” she was saying it with a grain of salt this time, but still better than not at all, “to get some flour out of the pantry so I can make pancakes?”<br/>
Mulder gets up, circling around his sister and partner on his way to the pantry.<br/>
“Hey, they’ll get around to it, I’m sure,” Samantha whispers to him as he passes her before turning to Scully and going: “And now, Dana, you need to tell me how you two met.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the next instalment of incredibly self-indulgent Trans Mulder fics.<br/>Maybe I'll write out the top surgery headcanon next I referenced in the beginning, a prequel so to speak.<br/>Feel free to give me all the validation I so desperately crave.</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>